replacing integral parts of a system is always a bit of a dilemma. If we
replace it only after all the other software/drivers that interface with it is known
to work well with it then nobody will bother doing all that compatbility work
since they can say "Nobody uses it yet, so why should I bother?" -- and hence
the change can never take place.

Hence regardless which way we do it we will do it the wrong way. Biting the
bullet and doing the change is however still the better, the only path to
improvement. With the limited amount of manpower we have pushing things out
knowing that there is some software/drivers that don't work well with it is our only
option -- especially if the software in question is unfixable by us since it is
closed source.

Hence, if we'd do as you wish and not make the distributions adopt
PulseAudio right now we can forget about fixing audio on Linux entirely and it
will stagnate forever.

As mentioned by J5 this was the same story with D-Bus, HAL, with udev, and other stuff.

And again, folks may claim that PulseAudio is very buggy. While it certainly
has bugs, like every software has, most of the issues reported are not things
we can or should fix/work-around in PulseAudio, but that are in other layers of
the system. In ALSA, in the drivers, in the client applications. However only
PA makes them become visible since it depends on a lot more functionality to
work properly than any other program before. And quite frankly we use a lot of stuff exactly nobody has used
before and that of course was broken due that (in ALSA as one example).

Having said all this. Just pointing to other folks to blame doesn't really
solve the problem. I did a lot of testing on different sound chips, making
sure PulseAudio works fine on them. Of course it's a limited testing set (six
cards right now to be exact, a seventh model currently being sent to me by my
employer, Red Hat.). The list of cards that are currently known to be
problematic are listed
in our Wiki.

I am not saying that the points you make are rubbish. However, please see the big picture before getting vocal about it.